Being Thought and Thinking Being in Hegel's Science of Logic (Complete Dissertation) (original) (raw)
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The Boundaries of Hegel’s Criticism of Kant’s Concept of the Noumenal
Hegel-Jahrbuch, 2016
Kant conceives of experience as the synthesis of understanding and intuition. Hegel argues that because Kant is presupposing two origins of experience, Kant in the end has to conclude that reality as it is in itself becomes a Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) that is placed outside of experience. As a result, Hegel claims, Kant is unable to think its inner unity of experience and reality and remains with a dualism between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself. In his own philosophy, most explicitly in the Introduction to Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel sets as his goal to overcome Kant's dualism.1 However, in his attempt to overcome Kant's dualism between the phenomenal and noumenal world, it seems that Hegel misses out on a certain dimension of Kant. In this contribution, I argue that Hegel's characterization of Kant's Thing-in-itself does not do justice to Kant. Basically, his criticism is that the Thing-in-itself is an empty abstraction that nevertheless aims to express something about being.2 Of course, this would be an obvious contradiction. I argue, however, that although for Kant the Thing-in-itself might be an abstraction, it is not simply empty-like in a skeptical negation, for instance. In the following, I explain that in my opinion its presumed emptiness-understood as the impossibility to have knowledge about it-is a determinate and complex conceptualization of a specific notion of absolute nothingness that rests on a reasonable negation rather than a skeptical one.
The Owl of Minerva, 1998
Kant’s “transcendental” or “critical” philosophy is an instance of what can be called the “critique of immediacy.” As part of his critical project, Kant argues that one cannot merely assume that there is a reestablished harmony between thought and being. Instead, one must effect a “return to the subject” and examine the forms of thought themselves, in order to determine the extent to which thought and being are commensurable. As a result of his “transcendental turn,” Kant concludes that what at first appears as immediately given to thought is always already (at least partly) the result of some kind of activity or mediation on the part of the thought itself. Hegel approves of Kant’s critical orientation: Kant correctly demanded to know “how far the forms of thought were capable of leading to the knowledge of truth,” and correctly concluded that “the forms of thought must be made into an object of investigation.” However, for Hegel, the problem with Kant was that he aimed to examine the forms of thought as if they were necessarily separated from being itself. Thus the Kantian strategy, for Hegel, led to a twofold absurdly.
Hegel's systematic treatment of the Doctrine of Being in his Science of Logic is characteristic of his methodology involving abstract ideas and logic. The dialectical method used in place of all other classical philosophical apparatus has caused for many, including this researcher, confusion. This paper shall investigate the basis, nature and implementation of Hegel's dialectical method within his Metaphysics and Logic. His Logic and metaphysics are one and the same, and for those who are not accustomed to the organic, mediated methodology, the paradoxes can often loose the inattentive scholar far behind. This inattentiveness also has led to inappropriate criticisms, which shall be seen later. This author will provide another development from the Hegelian dialectic that compliments or employs this method or one which can be separate and univocal.
South African Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming), 2015
In this paper we present a reconstruction of Hegel’s critique of Kant. We try to show the congruence of that critique in both theoretical and practical philosophy. We argue that this congruence is to be found in Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s hylemorphism in his theoretical and practical philosophy. Hegel is much more sympathetic to Kant’s response to the distinction between matter and form in his theoretical philosophy and he credits Kant with ‘discovering’ here that thinking is an activity that always takes place within a greater whole. He, however, argues that the consequences of this are much more significant than Kant suspects and that, most importantly, the model of cognition in which thought (form) confronts something non-thought (matter) is unsustainable. This leads to Hegel’s appropriation of Kantian reflective judgements, arguing that the greater whole in which thinking takes place is a socially shared set of meanings, something resembling what Kant calls a sensus communis. From here, it is not far to Hegel’s Geist, which eventually gains self-consciousness in Sittlichkeit, a whole of social practices of mutual recognition. In practical philosophy, Hegel argues for the importance of situating oneself within such a whole in order to attain the self-knowledge required for autonomous, or ethically required, action. For this to happen, he claims, Kantian Moralität needs to recognize its status as a form of Sittlichkeit or social practice. This would justify our practices without an appeal to a ‘fact of reason’ and also allow a wider range of actions that could count as autonomous.